BI Briefing: Metals & Mining: China, Change, Challenge and Opportunity

John Browning

Co-Founder and Managing Director

BANDS Financial Ltd

John was elected as a Board Member of the London Metal Exchange and the Chairman of its Ecommerce Committee between 2002 and 2004. He is widely acknowledged for establishing the LME electronic trading platform. In 2008, John moved to Hong Kong to work as Head of Metals Hong Kong for Newedge, where he designed and implemented the first futures arbitrage trading platform connecting the international and Chinse markets. In 2015 John co-founded BANDS Financial, a SFC regulated futures broker in Hong Kong. BANDS financial is prominent as Overseas Intermediary combing both mainland Chinese and international futures trading into a single commingled account. John is based in Shanghai.

XU Yongbin

Co-Chief Investment Officer

Entropy Capital

Mr. Xu is the Co-Chief Investment Officer and Portfolio Manager of Entropy Capital. Prior to joining Entropy Capital, he was acting as Portfolio Manager of Capula Investment Management (Hong Kong) from 2014 to 2019. From 2010 to 2014 he was jointly responsible for Emerging Market Trading at GLG Partners (UK), extensive trading in global multi asset class: foreign exchange, equity, fixed income and derivatives and the core team member in alpha generation. And before that he was a Quantitative Strategist at Macquarie Bank (UK) in 2010, Performing portfolios construction, optimizing and backtesting on proprietary equity trading strategy. He was also Author of Macquarie European Minimum Variance Equity Index. Mr. Xu graduated from Imperial College London with M.Sci Mathematics Hons in 2001. And then he obtained D.Phil in Mathematical Physics from Oriel College, University of Oxford in 2009.

Jcel Parsons

Portfolio Manager

Drakewood Prospect Fund

Joel Parsons manages Iron Ore & Steel for the Drakewood Prospect Fund, which trades metals futures and options across LME, CME and SGX markets. Previously he held a number of roles with BHP including Iron Ore Sales, Manager Chairman’s Office and Acquisitions and Divestments. He began his career providing corporate finance advice to clients in the natural resources sector at Macquarie Capital.

Richard Shi

Head of Research

Legend Arb Financial Group Limited

Richard holds a Bachelor degree of Information Engineering and Master Degree of Finance from the University of Hong Kong. After his study, Richard started his career at HSBC as trading support for equity derivatives. Later, he joined Rabobank and traded structured products, warrants and CBBC. Together with his team, he developed and validated new models and designed new structured products. In 2009, he joined All Options Asia Holding as a junior trader, responsible for market making in the Hong Kong stock options and index options. Besides, he has also traded different indices options (Korea, Japan, Europe and US). He was registered by the SFC as Licensed Representative for Type 1 (Dealing in Securities) and Type 2 (Dealing in Futures Contracts). In 2011, he joined LT Securities Limited as a trader, in charge of the setup of the market making and quantitative desk. Currently Richard is the responsible officer of Smart Wise Advisor Limited, one of the Legend Arb group subsidiaries, for Type 4 (Advising on Securities), Type 5 (Advising on Futures Contracts) and Type 9 (Asset Management) regulated activities. In recent years, he has been constantly developing new trading strategies of different types while managing and refining the current portfolio of trading strategies. Besides, he leads a team of quantitative researchers from different background to build an innovative research platform that makes the research process more streamlined, productive, adaptive and intelligent.

Tiger Shi

Managing Director

BANDS Financial Ltd

Chief Representative of Newedge Financial Inc. (“Newedge”), Mr. Shi founded CITIC Newedge Futures Co., Ltd. Before establishing BANDS, Mr. Shi held several senior roles at a number of international financial institutions, including as managing director and head of commodities futures for Jefferies Hong Kong Limited in Asia between 2012 to 2015 and head of metals for Newedge in Asia between 2008 to 2012. In 2020, Mr. Shi has been appointed as the member of the User Committee of the LME where he can voice the interests of metal trading community particularly from an Asian perspective.

Yi Zhu

Senior Industry Analyst, Asia-Pacific Metals & Mining

Bloomberg Intelligence

Yi has more than 15 years of experience in the metals and mining sector. Prior to joining Bloomberg Intelligence, she was a research analyst for Goldman Sachs and RBS covering Asian metals and mining stocks. Yi also has a strong background in industry research and metals hedging, gained with metal producers like Alcoa and Shenhuo Aluminum. Yi received her M.B.A. from Pennsylvania State University and holds a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Fudan University in Shanghai.